Salam Al-Marayati (Executive Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council) and Steven Jacobs (Founder of the Progressive Faith Foundation) have an op-ed in the LA Times today on “the manipulation and exploitation of Muslim-Jewish differences by political candidates in pursuit of votes”. Rabbi Jacobs is a Board Member of Faith in Public Life along with Chicago Theological Seminary President Susan Thistlethwaite.
Share This
Posted in Culture 
1 Comment »
By Professor Scott Haldeman
On Saturday, May 17th, Scott Haldeman, Associate Professor of Worship, delivered the charge to the graduates at CTS’ commencement. These are his remarks.
As we heard earlier in the service, Paul writes to the church in Rome:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God . . . . [for the time when] creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. (selected from Romans 8:18-29).
Suffering, bondage, decay—such are these days, such are the constraints on life on this side of the veil. And so we groan.
Certainly there has been much groaning around CTS this Spring. The faculty, the board, the staff—we have all been groaning. We are going through so many changes, constant transition—and so there are many misunderstandings and tensions; many difficult, costly and risky decisions taken, still more to face.
Oh, there has been groaning aplenty at CTS recently.
And, you, the students, especially those of you who graduate today—oh, we have heard you groaning:
How to get it all done? How to express your best thoughts?
How to earn that final, passing grade?
How to survive the oral examinations?
How to finish those final assignments?
Oh, we have heard you groaning! loudly and without ceasing!
But you are not groaning now. Now there are shouts of praise and thanksgiving. Now there is time for celebration. I celebrate with you. We, the faculty, commend and bless you . . . yet we also charge you. A charge to keep is our gift to you. For we look forward to news of your good works out in the world. We anticipate hearing how you have taken what we have offered you in our teaching and put such virtues into practice. We yearn for the abundant harvest of the fruit of your labors—as you nourish broken bodies to health and broken spirits towards wholeness, as you contribute to the increase of justice, mercy and peace in Woodlawn and Aurora, in Omaha and the Sudan, in Seoul and Baghdad, in Gary and Port-au-Prince.
Read the rest of this entry »
Share This
Posted in Event, CTS 2 Comments »
While we’re beginning planning for Ministerial Institute 2009, I’m slowly getting the video from MI08 up on Google. I hope to get the videos of the keynotes from MI08, as well as the worship services, up over the next couple of weeks, along with video from another event or two!
While you’re waiting for the rest, though, Susan Thistlethwaite’s keynote address from MI08 is up.
Update: The Rev. Tim Ahrens’ keynote just went live as well!
Share This
Posted in Event, CTS No Comments »
By President Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
On Saturday, May 17th, President Thistlethwaite delivered the commencement address at Chicago Theological Seminary. These are her remarks.
Before I get into my theme for this morning, I wanted to take a moment to remember Anthony Hollins. For those of you who didn’t know Anthony, he was a CTS graduate and a member of the staff at Trinity United Church of Christ who died this year. Anthony was a very talented dancer and when he heard that I planned to step down as president, he called me up and told me, yes told me, that he would choreograph a dance for this graduation. That was wonderful, I said. But then he said that he wanted me to dance with him. I had once revealed to Anthony that I had studied with Agnes DeMille in college and minored in dance. I wasn’t convinced yet that I would have done this, but I’ll bet actually that Anthony would have been able to talk me into it. But just for a moment now, let’s imagine him here, right here, as he would have been with his arms outstretched, kicking high above his head, loving the dance and loving serving God. [Moment of silence]
I wanted to talk to you today, seriously just talk, about what leadership is actually like based on my ten years of experience as president and share whatever learnings I have gleaned from this with you. This will not be a particularly theologically lyrical address, but rather as though we were sitting down together for coffee and you were planning your own careers as leaders in church and society. What advice do you have for me, Susan?
Read the rest of this entry »
Share This
Posted in Event, CTS No Comments »
On May 18th, pastors across the United Church of Christ began a sacred conversation on race. On May 25th, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, President of Chicago Theological Seminary, delivered a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ. Below is the text of her sermon.
Scripture:
Genesis 1:27
1 Corinthians 12:12-27
What’s Sacred About a Sacred Conversation on Race?
Our Board of Trustees, faculty and staff at CTS discussed1 the topic of a “Sacred Conversation on Race” at the recent board meeting. Dr. Lee Butler of our faculty contributed that what he thought made a conversation on race “sacred” was the foundational theological concept that all human beings are all created in the image of God and thus of equal value in the sight of God. I agree that this is foundational; I would like not so much to go in a different direction, but to add the doctrine of the church and the doctrine of the saving work of Christ, this is, ecclesiology and Christology, to this fundamental insight.
When I last stood here in this pulpit, I and many others came to stand with Trinity UCC against intrusive and really unethical practices on the part of the media. We are one church, we declared, and when you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.
This is another way of saying what I think Paul was trying to get at in his first letter to the Corinthians, though he said it in a far more elegant way. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (v. 27)
There is no way we can have a sacred conversation on race and not have Christ be the center of it. No way at all.
Now there are many conversations on race. Libraries and bookstores have whole huge sections on ‘race.’ Sociologists weigh in, psychologists, social workers, economists, political scientists, educators and a host of others have said plenty over the years, some of it just blather, some of it helpful perhaps, but none of it sacred.
There are some who think that we should not be having this sacred conversation on race in this election season. “Spare Us the ‘Conversation’ on Race” wrote Timothy Shriver in the Washington Post early this week. Now, this column is not quite as bad as its title would suggest; what the writer says he really doesn’t want is a bunch more talk and no action. “What we don’t need at this time is another “conversation” because our national conversations on race feel like bad marriage counseling sessions. We vent, we point fingers, we name the problem over and over again only to find ourselves getting up off the couch in the exact same state of mind as before we sat down.”
I don’t know where Shriver spends his time that he, who from his picture appears very much to be a white man, is having all these intense conversations on race that aren’t going anywhere. I know from my personal experience as a white person that it is like pulling teeth to get other white people to take five minutes to think seriously about race. Shriver’s day job is the CEO of the Special Olympics. It is instructive that he dedicates his Post column to “religion from the perspective of the inner life.” From this I conclude that perhaps he is simply having these conversations with himself. No wonder it’s not really going anywhere.
But seriously, it is instructive that he leaves out the word “sacred” when he talks about the work the UCC is trying to jump start in a Sacred Conversation on Race. I do think that secular conversations on race, when they happen at all, are kind of stuck in a rut and don’t much get us anywhere. And if Shriver wants to promote volunteerism as a better alternative, he’s probably right.
But what we really haven’t tried with any seriousness is a sacred conversation on race. We need to do that together as a church and then turn we can turn to the larger culture and address them from a church perspective.
In the UCC it is distressingly, however, often the other way around. As a liberal church, the UCC in general is more inclined to consult the social sciences rather than the scripture to address a problem. I’m not saying that the social sciences are useless; far from it. We need all the real science we can get these days.
But science (that is real science, not, for example, intelligent design) works by empirical method. It describes what is.
Paul, in Corinthians, is talking about the church as it ought to be.
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
So it is with Christ that we move from the is to the ought. The world may give us division, strife, and racial conflict. But Christ does not give us this division. Christ gives us wholeness. When we are baptized into the one body, then we are of one spirit and racial division, religious division or social division cannot stand. Or, should not be allowed to stand.
The fear that baptism set a slave free was undoubtedly present among the early French and English planters of America including the West Indies. In 1639, Maryland became the first colony to specifically pass a law stating that baptism as a Christian did not make a slave a free person. In 18th century Britain and in the colonies, it was popularly believed that baptism made African slaves free. Some early legal judgments on slavery referred to slaves as “heathens” as a justification of the slave trade, and passages from the Bible were used to suggest that becoming a Christian conferred freedom.
As a result, many plantation owners refused to allow their slaves baptism until the American colonies passed laws that explicitly outlawed freedom by baptism.
The earliest interpretation is certainly the one Paul intended. How can part of the body be enslaved and part free?
Race itself is not a religious category; it is a social construction, even a social fiction invented when the whole “heathen” thing collapsed as a reason that some could be enslaved. The Romans were more honest in their approach to slavery. You were conquered, you lost, you got made a slave. But slaves could be freed, could sometimes even earn their own freedom and become Roman citizens. Race did not enter into it.
It is the western Europeans and the American colonies that invent the fiction of racial inferiority in order to justify slavery as well as colonialism.
Biology supports Paul. The Human Genome Project, the mapping of the whole human genetic code, has opened up avenues for many new and promising therapies, but it has also demonstrated what a remarkable difference there is between biological race and the social construction of race.
A couple of years ago, my husband, who is a surgeon and medical scientist at the University of Chicago, and I taught a course called “Race, Gender and the Genome.” We looked at race and gender from a genetic standpoint, a social standpoint and a theological and biblical standpoint.
One of the things we did in the class was do a lab on our own genetic fingerprint. It’s not hard; you spit into a test tube, add some chemicals, spin it around and then send the resulting precipitate to a lab. Back comes your DNA fingerprint. We also received charts comparing our dominant genetic characteristics to those of people from Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa etc. My DNA most closely matches that of the Asian profile. That’s right, genetically speaking, I’m Asian.
How could that be? Well, my grandparents immigrated from Hungary and where to do the Hungarians come from? Many Hungarians are descendents of vast Asian migrations to the West. Back in my ancient genetic past, I am Asian, though of course I look Western European. My genetic type is my genotype; the way I look is called my phenotype. And of course, everybody is a mix of a lot of things as well—these are only dominant trends.
Some African Americans students in the class were startled to realize how little of their genetic profile actually fits the African pattern. But when it comes to the social construction of race, of course, none of this matters. Society uses race to distribute and maintain certain power hierarchies—no actual facts are allowed to interfere.
But Paul was ahead of his time, way ahead apparently. His image of the body is really less image and more empirical fact than anything else, because at the end of the day, what the Human Genome Project shows is that we are more than 99.9% all exactly alike when it comes to race. We are actually all one body.
How can it be otherwise? Because we are all in Christ and because what Christ tells us is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we actually are one body and Paul says that you are really a fool if you keep refusing to recognize this simple truth. “If the foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye,I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” In other words, get a grip. You are all part of one another and while different, the difference is what makes the whole the body of Christ because Christ is not divided against Christ.
What happens when we don’t recognize that we are all one body in Christ? Conflict, alienation, and power hierarchies are the result. It’s right there in the text. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you…But God has so arranged the body…that there be no dissention within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.”
Well, you know as well as I do that Paul would not be bringing up dissention unless, in fact, the Corinthian church had dissention in its midst. We know that as well from the rest of the letter. But that’s not the church, then, Paul says. The point of the church is that the members care for one another. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.”
This is what we have to say to the world. You would divide humanity by race, but we refuse. You would reward some by race and punish others, but we suffer together and we celebrate together. We do when we are in Christ.
I confess to you that for all the years I have been at CTS and lived and worked in such a racially diverse community, still I realized recently that I was letting the world set the terms on what I could hope for in terms of racial transformation in this society. If you listen to the sociologists, the psychologists, the social workers and the educators, you do have to see that race divides, that the so-called ‘post-racial’ America has not exactly arrived. That is the way the world is.
It was also the way the Corinthian church was. Paul gets right into it in the beginning of the letter. I’m not writing just to say ‘hello,’ but “it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.”
But that is not why Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, suffered, died and rose. Yes, the message of the cross is foolishness, except to those who are being saved.
A life in Christ Jesus is lived differently and is measured by different standards. “We have the mind of Christ.”
As one body in Christ we teach the world that our racial differences are our joy, our wisdom, our strength, and when you cause one of us to suffer, you cause all of us to suffer. And when a church stands, as you have, in the midst of utter chaos and stereotyping and unbelievable intrusions into your sacred space and you still stand with courage, and with honor and with a renewed spirit of love among you, then I say to you, I am honored to be in the body of Christ with Trinity United Church of Christ and I am honored by what I have learned from you and I have been immeasurably enriched by the spiritual depths of the African American experience in this country shared so generously with me by so many. And I thank God for you. Our lives, our church, our country and indeed the world would be so diminished without your witness.
Share This
Posted in UCC, Social Justice, Culture 3 Comments »
See below for a note from current CTS Trustee and MCC Moderator, the Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson. The Rev. Troy Perry is a former member of the Seminary’s Board of Trustees.
Dear MCC Friends:
MCC Founder Rev. Troy Perry has spent a lifetime changing history and making history — and today, he did it again.
This morning, the Supreme Court of California ruled in favor of the marriage lawsuit jointly brought by Troy and his spouse, Phillip Ray De Blieck, along with MCC friend and LGBT activist Robin Tyler, and her partner, Diane Olson.
I am thrilled to share Troy and Phillip’s heartfelt statement below.
Equality for all people, including marriage equality, has been an integral part of Troy’s passion and ministry for almost 40 years. It’s worth remembering that in 1969, as the Stonewall Rebellion took place in New York City, Troy was already organizing the LGBT community in Southern California, had already established Metropolitan Community Churches — and had performed what Time Magazine has credited as the first public same-sex wedding in the United States. All before Stonewall — amazing!
And in January of 1970, Troy made history again when he filed the first-ever lawsuit in the United States seeking legal recognition of same-gender marriages. The court dismissed the case before it ever came to trial, but it accomplished something profound: It birthed the marriage equality movement, and with it, four decades of debate, activism, struggle, prayer and persistence.
May a new generation of activists rise up and continue Troy’s example of changing our world and working for an end to discrimination and injustice — until our brothers and sisters in Jamaica no longer are attacked and killed solely for their sexual orientation and gender variance, until LGBT people in Pakistan no longer face the threat of death if found to be lesbian or gay, until LGBT people in Moldova can freely march in the streets without being targets of mob violence, until LGBT people no longer are smeared and ridiculed by the tabloid press in Nigeria, until our brothers and sisters no longer experience rejection from churches and communities of faith, until teens and young adults no longer take their own lives because they believe God hates them.
Until that day, ours is an unfinished world.
And it’s a reminder that for Metropolitan Community Churches, ours is an unfinished calling.
Grace and peace,
Nancy
Rev. Nancy L. Wilson
MCC Moderator
Share This
Posted in Social Justice, CTS No Comments »
Chicago Theological Seminary, founded in 1855 will hold its Commencement on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at Hyde Park Union Church.
Since its founding, the Seminary has been a strong witness for justice and peace in both church and society. This year’s honorary degree recipients continue that tradition.
CTS will present Mr. Howard Campbell Morgan, a prominent civic leader, with the degree of Doctor of Laws. Mr. Morgan is responsible for establishing Citibank’s expanded operations in Chicago. Both before and since his retirement after forty-one years in leadership positions at Citibank, he has worked diligently on many not-for-profit boards to advance human rights and religious understanding. He is the immediate past chair of the Chicago Theological Seminary Board of Trustees. Mr. Morgan currently serves as a trustee of The Court Theatre in Chicago; Openlands Project, an environmental and conservation organization; Interfaith Youth Core, a group that teaches young people about interfaith religious understanding through community service; and as Life Trustee of Lincoln Park Zoo. He is also a co-author and editor with his brothers, Drs. John and Richard Morgan, of the book In the Shadow of Grace, about the faith of their grandfather, Rev. Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, judged one of the ten greatest preachers of the twentieth century by The Christian Century.
In addition, the seminary will present Dr. James Cone, noted theologian, with a Doctor of Divinity. Professor Cone is the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and he is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dr. Cone has received numerous honors in his outstanding career. He is the author of eleven books and over 150 articles. He has lectured at more than 1,000 universities and community organizations. He is best known for his ground-breaking works, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). These pioneering works are often taught at Chicago Theological Seminary as well as many other colleges, universities and seminaries, as are Dr. Cone’s other excellent works, especially God of the Oppressed (1975) and Martin & Malcolm & America (1991). His work has had profound influence both in the United States and around the world on the fundamental task of theology and the role of the theologian.
Share This
Posted in Event, CTS No Comments »
From Don Clark, Chairperson of the Board
Dear Friends,
Chicago Theological Seminary is on the move.
For only the second time in our 153-year history, we are moving to a new campus. Our new facility, to be completed in 2012, will be located at the southeast corner of Dorchester and 60th Street, ensuring continuity for our cherished relationships within the Hyde Park and Woodlawn community.
Naturally, we have a tremendous sense of history at our current campus, and we approach this change with a mix of emotions. But we are confident of our purpose: to plant seeds of growth in an ideal setting where we can translate that history into fresh vitality.
Our new building, overlooking the Midway Plaisance, will have a “green” design, helping us fulfill the good stewardship of the Earth entrusted to us. The four-story, 75,000-square-foot building will feature a welcoming chapel and meeting space for worship and gatherings, as well as classrooms, offices and room for future expansion.
This mutually beneficial transaction reflects the creativity and cooperation of two longtime institutional neighbors. The University of Chicago will purchase our existing buildings, construct and furnish our new facilities according to our plans, and give us access to greatly appreciated student housing.
Much prayerful consideration went into this process, along with leadership by Susan Thistlethwaite and tireless efforts by our negotiating team. Faculty, staff, alumni, students, and trustees past and present all played an important part in planning. In particular, the Rev. Verlee Copeland, first vice chair of our board, brought a pastoral perspective and experience with a major building program at her church in west suburban Hinsdale. Together, their contributions, as well as the support of the Hyde Park community and Woodlawn Organization leadership, are greatly appreciated.
With our new home in planning and our new president, Alice Hunt, joining us this fall, these are exciting times for Chicago Theological Seminary. As we meet the challenges ahead, let us take this opportunity to celebrate the promise of growth as we pursue our mission with renewed vigor and vision.
For more information about the upcoming move, please visit here.
Share This
Posted in CTS No Comments »
by Lee H. Butler, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Theology and Psychology, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Black Faith and Life at Chicago Theological Seminary, and President, Society for the Study of Black Religion
I am deeply affected by the attitudes that have recently been expressed against the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Instead of seeking understanding, there has been a blatant disregard for the simple rules of conversation. Developing a story against a person and a people, and then asking a person and people to speak in defense against that closed-ended story does not advance understanding. The controversy that bears the pejorative language of “hate,” “racist,” and “anti-American” is not a simple and isolated indictment of one man and one congregation. This controversy disparages the African American preaching tradition and the African American Church heritage.
When David Letterman and Bill Maher “splice and dice” video footage which typecasts President George W. Bush, people don’t condemn the President and scream impeachment on the grounds of those portrayals. Furthermore, we don’t charge and judge the American people with incompetency for living beneath the administration of a President who has been typecast and caricatured as incompetent. And yet, from a single, isolated sound bite, African American theology and the African American prophetic preaching tradition have been judged and condemned.
For as much as I am dismayed by judgments based upon sound bites, I am aware of the “American way” of using sound bites to define a person’s life. A few sound bites that come to mind are: “Give me liberty or give me death;” “I cannot tell a lie;” “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country;” “My fellow Americans;” “I have a dream today;” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Even as most know the personages who spoke each of those phrases, we recognize that those important moments-frozen in time and impressed upon the American consciousness-do not sum up the lives of the speakers. We do not allow phrases to totally define a person’s whole life story. In most instances, we respond to these phrases because they represent our self understanding as a nation. Just as some phrases support our self understanding, there are also phrases that challenge our image.
Consequently, I am deeply disturbed by the way thirty seconds of sound bite have come to represent 36 years of ministry at the church known as Trinity United Church of Christ. The absurdities of this reductionism can be viewed in one of the earliest media reports that prompted the first firestorm. A news journal interviewer identified the church as “Trinity Unity Church” and “Trinity United” during the same interview/report, and further suggested the church to be a separatist cult. Trinity United Church of Christ is neither a part of the Unity Church nor is it a nondenominational or separatist community of believers that stands outside the Christian heritage as a cult might. There was not enough integrity in the early reporting to respectfully identify the church as the Trinity United Church of Christ, a member congregation of a predominantly white denomination, that is, the United Church of Christ (UCC) that has its national offices in Cleveland, OH. This same disregard for respectful detailing continues to mark the controversy that grips and disenfranchises so many today.
Read the rest of this entry »
Share This
Posted in UCC, Theology, Social Justice, Culture 2 Comments »
by Tom Montgomery-Fate (MA ‘95)
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns…
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Spring is here. How do I know? The coyotes are moving. They have mated and are searching for dens. I saw a pair in a subdivision in West Chicago last weekend and one jackknifed out of some waist-high weeds along the prairie path today while I was running.
The presence of coyotes in the suburbs and city has become a popular topic in recent years, with more people—or, quite unfortunately, their dogs—coming into contact with the animals. This has stirred both excitement and fear.
Urban coyotes excite us. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because a coyote sparks a nostalgia for the wild, for the natural world we’ve conquered and nearly destroyed. They spark the memory of ourselves as animals.
But urban coyotes also prompt fear. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because no one wants their miniature dachsund eaten as a midnight snack, or to be sitting in a lawn chair some evening and turn to see a “wild” animal steal a porkchop off a gas grill. The coyote reminds us: we are not wild, not animals, but human.
I grew up in Iowa—fishing and hunting on my friends’ farms––but in all those years I only saw four coyotes, and always from a distance. The first coyote I ever saw up close was in Glen Ellyn, the suburb where I now live. On a morning walk the crash of a garbage can lid drew my eyes to a neighbor’s driveway, where a thin, mangy dog was chewing on a wedge of pizza crust. He ran. I later figured out it wasn’t a dog, that coyotes and their families were moving to the burbs. And it wasn’t for the schools.
Recent studies show that urban and suburban coyotes do better than their country cousins. There’s more to eat and good places to hide. Rural coyotes have a 30% chance of making it through their first year; urban coyotes have a 60 % chance. In rural areas the leading cause of coyote death is hunting or trapping; for urban coyotes it’s cars. Thus, suburban towns with slow traffic speeds and large parks or forest preserves—like Glen Ellyn—are a more likely place to see coyotes than in the country.
But they’ve been popping up everywhere.
A suburban high school English teacher was walking through the Lincolnwood Mall parking lot back to her minivan, when she noticed a thin animal slinking between the rows of cars and slowly coming toward her. Suddenly, the coyote lunged for her 4 year-old miniature poodle, clamping his jaws around the dog’s hindquarters. The teacher grabbed the head and there, in the mall parking lot, she and the coyote had a tug of war.
Lured by the smell of sizzling meat, a coyote wove through a half mile of bumper to bumper traffic and harried shoppers and soapbox preachers to reach the propped open door of a Quiznos on Adams Street in downtown Chicago. The docile thirty pound canine walked past the counter without ordering and lay down on a stack of Diet Pepsi in an open cooler and stayed there.
Two jets had to abort their landings at O’Hare Airport until some coyotes could be cleared from the landing strip. Airport workers frequently see them trotting near the O’Hare runways. In the last fifteen years 23 coyotes have been hit by airplanes in Illinois. Cars and roadkill I understand. But airplanes? “Runway” kill?
The point is that beyond the excitement and fear that the coyote provokes is a simple truth: its arrival into our “territory” is less an intrusion than a natural migration. Their “reverse commute” from the disappearing “country” to the suburbs and city is largely in response to Chicago’s wild sprawl.
Like goldenrod and starlings and people, coyotes adapt well to changing and disturbed environments. They have learned to flourish in the niches of habitat that dot Chicago’s chaotic geometry of roads and towns and subdivisions. But as these green pockets and corridors shrink; as they continue to be divided and subdivided by new highways and Wal-Marts, our tolerance of these brash new neighbors may wane. At these points of frustration it may serve us well to remember that their behavior has evolved in response to ours. And that as the boundaries between country, suburb, and city have blurred, so has the definition of the “wild” and “the natural.”
Tom Montgomery-Fate is a professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and the author of Steady and Trembling: Art, Faith, and Family in an Uncertain World.
Share This
Posted in Uncategorized No Comments »
June 26, 2008 By Development
